


Shimmering Diamonds

by HaroThar



Series: She-ra but with Quadrants [2]
Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Background Bow/Glimmer, Background Relationships, Caretaking, Cuddling, Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Fluff, Humans with Quadrants, Hurt/Comfort, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Shoosh-Papping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:48:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21754015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HaroThar/pseuds/HaroThar
Summary: Adora and Glimmer need to recharge just as much as anyone else, but don't have much to say. Adora reminisces on all the ways she's loved her diamond, and touches each precious place.
Relationships: Adora & Glimmer (She-Ra)
Series: She-ra but with Quadrants [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1567906
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Shimmering Diamonds

**Author's Note:**

> There are a lot of ways to do pale romance and I think Adora and Glimmer definitely lean into the more physical aspect of moirallegiance. Also Adora's a sap who works too hard what else is new.

Adora took a deep breath as Bow pulled away from the hug, and smiled to herself when she saw the way his face fell all soft and sweet as he looked to Perfuma. She turned her eyes to her own diamond, and felt her own face soften in much the same way.

“Hey, Glimmer,” she said, nudging against Glimmer’s arm with her body weight, smiling down at her. Glimmer looked up with tired and frustrated eyes, but her breath caught when she met Adora’s gaze.

“Hey,” she said, then rubbed the bridge of her nose. She looked… not great, and although Adora was of the firm belief that they were right, they couldn’t afford to wait for the Horde’s next move before they made a plan, she also, possibly, potentially could see that Bow was right too. She wanted to take Glimmer somewhere with rounded edges and steady, comforting white noise instead of the daunting lines of the war room and all the clattering voices. 

She placed her hand on Glimmer’s shoulder, in perfect shoulder-touching range, and said, “We’d better be off, then.”

Glimmer’s lips thinned, but nodded, and walked side-by-side with Adora, both of them tense and strung tight.

“Okay, but, I just want to say that if we have Perfuma and Mermista working together, instead of Perfuma and Frosta, it would probably—”

‘Adora,” Glimmer cut her off, rubbing at one eye, other hand reaching out to grab Adora’s wrist, “I know, okay? I know. But let’s just… leave it.”

“Yeah, okay,” Adora said, placing her hand on top of Glimmer’s. God, she looked so tired. Adora wanted to… touch. To stroke her cheek, to smooth out the furrow in Glimmer’s brow with her thumbs. They would, soon. They’d be in Glimmer’s room, nice and private, and Adora could touch as much as she wanted.

When the door shut behind them, Glimmer leaned against it with a loud groan. “Why does everything suck so much?”

“Glimmer,” Adora started, hands reaching for that face, her round cheeks and bright eyes and the sparkling hair that was frazzled out of its normal style.

“Not yet!” Glimmer cut Adora off again, gripping her by the wrists. “Noooot yet. First,” Glimmer teleported the two of them and dropped Adora down into her bed. Adora landed with a small “oof.”

“Alright,” Glimmer barked, sounding like she was still on the battlefield and not like she had her diamond somewhere nice and soft and secluded. “I will be right back. Get comfortable.”

Adora would’ve scoffed at the order if Glimmer hadn’t teleported away just as fast, and her lips quirked despite herself. She shifted, piling the pillows up in a half-wall behind her, gathering the blankets, preparing a proper pile. It still astounded Adora that Glimmer could actually _sleep_ on this bed. Even the most lavish piles in the Fright Zone weren’t quite this plush, and the bedding? Forget it. Adora suspected the reason they jammed about their feelings in Glimmer’s bed and not, like, an actual pile-shaped-pile, was because Adora’s mind simply wasn’t wired to handle whatever ridiculousness a Bright Moon pile would entail. Even a year with the Rebellion couldn’t erase everything.

“I got snacks,” Glimmer announced loudly, teleporting back into the bed. Adora jumped, but was relaxed again just as fast, and Glimmer dumped her armfuls into Adora’s lap. Fruit, dried fruit, bottles of fruit juice, and packets of ~~candy~~ fruit snacks rolled and flopped over Adora’s legs and onto the blankets and mattress beneath. Adora’s diamond twirled inside her chest, in her core where her ribcage met. She smiled up at Glimmer, who was rubbing at her forehead again, but caught the smile and rolled her eyes affectionately.

“You got my favorites,” Adora stated, warm but waggling her eyebrows knowingly, teasingly. She unscrewed the cap of a bottle of tangy juice first (wouldn’t Bow be proud? Prioritizing hydration) and downed half of it before handing it out for Glimmer. Glimmer flopped down on the bed, arm closest to Adora flung over her eyes, other flopping out uselessly, wrist dangling over the edge of the bed.

“Ugh.”

“You gotta drink, Glimmer.”

“UGH!”

“Nice Mermista impression. Still gotta hydrate.”

Glimmer lifted the arm over her eyes to flip Adora off, squinting at her, and Adora chuckled. She nudged the bottle against that middle finger and Glimmer took it, hoisting herself up into a sitting position with great theatrics. 

This time, Adora met no resistance when she pressed her hand into Glimmer’s thick, fluffy hair. It was textured differently than any hair Adora had otherwise experienced. Fluffy, soft, but weirdly stiff, too. The places where the sparkles were dense had an almost static-electricity feel to them, that same hum over Adora’s skin, but where static would leave her zapping the next person or metal pipe she touched, Glimmer’s hair never left her with anything. Just the hum, and an endless curiosity, a need to touch it always. She stroked gently, petting her diamond, fingers catching on tangles that she gently tugged apart with her fingers.

She used her other hand to dig into the fruit, the whole stuff first. The dried fruit and fruit snacks were too sweet for Adora, even after all this time, for her to eat before the actual food-food. She devoured the majority of what Glimmer brought, still able to pack it all away like she’d never tasted good food before in her life (and the food here was still so, so good), and then she threw her belt and jacket to the side of the bed, where it was joined by Glimmer’s cape and high pauldrons. After removing their boots as well, Adora leaned back on the pile, popping craisins into her mouth one after the other lazily, unrushed. Glimmer downed another bottle of something that smelled heavily of citrus, and then flopped down next to Adora.

“Ugh!”

“Ugh,” Adora agreed, in a much milder tone. Her foot started tapping. Now that she didn’t have any food to distract her, and she’d had a chance to clear her head a little (and hydrate), her mind was firmly back on how they’d failed that day. How _she’d_ failed. “Okay, but seriously, if Scorpia and Entrapta flanked with their bots from—”

“Adora!” Glimmer scolded, papping her firmly on the face, “Shoosh!”

“I just—”

“No! No war talk. First of all, Bow forbade it; you don’t want to disappoint Bow, do you?”

Adora held up a finger and pointed it directly at Glimmer, making her go a little cross eyed. “That’s a dirty trick, using my need to please people against me.”

“The dirtiest,” Glimmer said, smug and charming, “And secondly,” Glimmer took Adora’s accusatory finger and the hand it was attached to and pressed a kiss to Adora’s palm. It still made Adora’s cheeks heat up, having her diamond lover kiss somewhere so sensitive, so intimate, “I don’t _want_ to talk about war stuff right now. I’ve got the world’s palest diamond in a pile and a waterfall making soothing background noise and I’m full and comfy and Adora, I’m _tired._ I don’t _want_ to think about failure or how frustrating everything is or how we’re going to fix this, just yet. Please?”

“Okay,” Adora said, softened by Glimmer’s admission. Displays of physical weakness were highly discouraged in the Horde. Emotional weakness, even moreso. That someone so brave, so strong, so powerful, and stubborn, and persistent, would lie here with Adora and confess to her weaknesses, it wrecked Adora. It wrecked something deep-rooted in her core and turned her into mush.

“Okay,” Adora repeated, softer, brushing her calloused palm over Glimmer’s perfect forehead, stroking her hair away from it. “Okay, let’s not think about any of that, then. Don’t think about anything,” Adora murmured, thumbing along the soft line of Glimmer’s cheekbone, cupping her jaw in her palm, staring at pink eyes that softened at the corners, and closed with a heavy sigh. “Just let your cares melt away,” Adora said, echoing what Glimmer had said to her on Mystacore, so long ago, when they were green and only flirting and so unsure of themselves. “Slowly, slowly,” Adora murmured.

Adora was not built to think of nothing. It wasn’t how her brain worked; even when she was falling asleep, she was always thinking about _something,_ so she had no real way to turn her brain off. So she elected to think of her favorite thing in all the world: Glimmer.

She pet once more at Glimmer’s hair, remembering when she’d changed its style, how it had been born half of confidence, of growing into the role she’d always been meant to play, and half from grief, the loss of the mother they both shared, blood and spirit. 

Adora placed her palm on Glimmer’s cheek, feeling Glimmer sigh, much more contentedly this time, beneath her hand. She thought of how often she touched this precious face, how she did it to calm, to center, to guide Glimmer’s eyes to her own, to snap her out of an angry spiral. 

Glimmer’s neck, so vital, so delicate, so, so intimate. She trusted her to touch her there, not to break or strangle or pinch the vein that carried blood to her brain. Glimmer _trusted_ Adora, and her core fluttered at the thought. Glimmer trusted her, so implicitly, so entirely, trusted her with her life, her diamond, to fight by her side and to lay by it, soothing. Adora’s breath came out shaky, and Glimmer smiled, eyes still closed.

“You’re thinking sappy thoughts, aren’t you?” she asked, sleepiness slurring her words together, dragged off her tongue. Adora kissed her forehead.

“Yeah.”

She touched Glimmer’s shoulder next, rubbed at it. So tense, carrying the weight of a country, the Rebellion, the war on these narrow shoulders. One was the shoulder her old pauldron had rested on, the one attached to her cape. Glimmer had given Adora her cape that first day, keeping her safe from the people of Thaymor, their suspicion and distrust, hiding her, shielding her, allowing her the first normal experience she’d ever really had. That cape had been a necessary component in the line of events that led to Adora discovering that she really, really, and I mean _really_ liked fruit. The other shoulder, just as tense, was where Adora had leaned, once, propped her elbow on and smirked at an arrogant sailor. She’d been in Glimmer’s corner, the two of them a unit, sassy and showing it.

Adora wrapped her arms around her diamond, and her breath caught as Glimmer snuggled in, making a tired, half-asleep noise as she pressed her nose to Adora’s clavicle. Adora’s arms tightened minutely; Glimmer was so precious. So precious to her, no one else in all of Etheria mattered quite as much. Adora would fight this war even if it was just for Glimmer alone. She’d been raised to worship Hordak, to die for his cause, and Adora was willing to die, alright, but for Glimmer, her diamond, her palest love, she would do anything for her, she would slaughter thousands if that was what it took to keep her safe, if anyone tried to hurt _her_ Glimmer she would _hack them to pieces with her sword, she would strike the ground with a heave and shock the earth with golden malice, she—_

Breathe, slow down, back off. 

In the Horde, love came with something called The Violence of Affection. It was expected, considered a healthy part of any serious relationship. To fight alongside the ones you love, to do _anything_ to keep them safe, it was honorable, noble, romantic.

Adora had learned quickly that, like many other aspects of her life, that wasn’t how things worked here.

But even so, she would. She would do anything for Glimmer, she thought, as she stroked her hands over Glimmer’s back, occasionally brushing against the tips of her wings, so small, so precious, just like the rest of her. 

This back had leaned against her, in the hot springs of Mystacor, where Adora had felt genuine peace for the first time in the twenty years of her life. This back had carried Adora through the labyrinth of Dryl’s castle, when Adora was vulnerable, weak, out of her mind from some mechanical virus, sick in a way that felt so good yet frightened her to her core. But Glimmer had kept her safe, had always, always protected her. Glimmer had taken every single vulnerability Adora had ever shown, every weakness, and she’d protected her, been strong where Adora was hurting and frightened. 

Adora nosed against Glimmer’s hair, and focused on the weight of her arms around Adora’s waist, focused on her palms against Adora’s back. Her strong arms, always moving, flailing, motioning, never still, active and expressive and passionate in a way that left Adora staring, passionate like all of Glimmer was. These arms had held her up when her mind was detached from her body, cradling her to her chest as malicious spiders had closed in around them. Glimmers hands, so often gloved, that glowed and sparkled, that wielded magic and a staff, that touched Adora when she needed someone to calm her, to guide her back into herself. How often had Glimmer taken one of Adora’s hands in both of hers and stroked the back, either anxiously soothing herself, or eagerly reminding Adora that Glimmer was there for her, that they were in this, all of this, together?

When Adora was still a new addition to Glimmer’s life, she’d seen how Glimmer had done that same anxious gesture with Bow, and had been nauseatingly, infuriatingly jealous. She couldn’t even hate Bow for it, which just made it worse, because what else could Adora do if she couldn’t hit the problem to make it go away, or hit things in a general sense to calm down, and the person she wanted most in the world to calm her was—seemingly—in diamonds with someone else?

Adora had almost wept when she learned that Bow and Glimmer were in the flushest of hearts, and Glimmer’s diamond was wide open. The only reason Adora _hadn’t_ wept was because she was too busy coming up with a plan to woo Glimmer, to snatch up that diamond while it was empty and place herself in that role in Glimmer’s life. How miraculous, then, that their diamond had fallen together naturally, seamlessly, without any schemes or grand gestures or violence, no admission price to pay. Glimmer had simply loved her. Loved her like Adora loved Glimmer. 

Adora’s eyes misted over just remembering that fact. 

There, in Glimmer’s arms, Adora was _wanted._ Not as She-ra, not as the most promising of the cadets, just Adora. She was just Adora, and Glimmer wanted her, soothed her, anchored her ever-active mind, held her, trusted her. Glimmer loved her.

God, she loved her.

Adora pressed her lips to Glimmer’s hair, closed, hardly even qualifying as a kiss, really. And there, in her diamond’s arms, she drifted off, like she had in the Mystacor baths, like she had when she was still unable to sleep from loneliness and nightmares and Glimmer had offered a surplus of “sleepovers.”

She still woke up multiple hours before Glimmer did, but that was fine. She wasn’t really built for naps. She was built for fighting, for strategy, and her mind was feeling so, so much sharper after some food, drink, and sleep. Loathe as she was to admit it, Bow was not only right, but she had in fact been wrong. She’d needed this. 

However, it didn’t count as _discussing_ future battle plans if Glimmer was asleep and neither of them were talking out loud, so. Adora began plotting in her mind, working out various scenarios, identifying the weaknesses of each, weighing options and mentally twisting things around, introducing variables and going over countermeasures for anything she could think of that the Horde would throw at them.

When Glimmer did wake, Adora was feeling good. Ready. Refreshed and prepared. She kissed her perfect nose and asked, “Sleep well?”

“Mmm,” Glimmer hummed, but it wasn’t a particularly aggravated hum so it meant yes. Adora gave Glimmer plenty of time to wake up, knowing Glimmer was always slow to do so (unless waking up involved getting dumped into steaming magic pools, then Glimmer woke up pretty quickly). Adora stroked her back and mentally fiddled with the idea of having Entrapta build flying drones for scouting. It’d be late to the game, but if Entrapta could do it without needing too much time and the drones were fast enough, it could give them an edge. It would depend on how soon Adora got out of this pile; fortunately, as far as Adora knew, Entrapta didn’t have any diamond to speak of, so the only real roadblock past her own reluctance to move would be _finding_ Entrapta. What in Bright Moon classified as the highest tech? Other than the communications table; Entrapta had already fiddled with that until she’d gotten bored of it. 

“You’re scheming, aren’t you?” Glimmer asked, squinting at Adora, her hair sticking up in every direction. Adora affectionately stroked at it, trying to flatten it a little, but it was thick and as stubborn as the woman who grew it.

“It’s not discussing future battle plans if we haven’t actually discussed anything,” Adora said, smugly circumventing a direct disappointment to Bow. Yay loopholes!

Glimmer laughed and whacked her arm, rolling over. She then groaned. “God, you’re impossible. Did you at least sleep a little?”

“I did! And I am feeling _great!_ I’m ready to take on the Horde again, and I’ve got some ideas, I’ll tell you in the war room, but first I need to go find Entrapta and see if she can do this one thing for me,” Adora said, sitting up and tugging her jacket and belt on, then fumbling with a large fleece for her boots. How’d they even get under there?

“You go ahead,” Glimmer said with a yawn, “I’ll be down in a minute. Ugh, my hair.”

“It’s super adorable right now, just wanted to mention,” Adora teased affectionately, honest and playful. Glimmer whacked her again, and Adora whacked back.

“Get out of here, sap. Go do your planning thing, I’ll catch up.”

Adora bent over, planting a kiss right to Glimmer’s nose, and then hopped out of bed onto the floating staircase. She was glad it hadn’t abruptly disappeared, like it had when Glimmer was sick from the Black Garnet. Adora still wasn’t sure what in Etheria had happened there, but now she was always paranoid that she’d wake up from a pile and the stairs would have mysteriously vanished again. 

At the doorway, Adora turned, blew Glimmer one last kiss, and then took off at a jog, ponytail bouncing and fingers itching to start up again, to _do_ and plot and fight. Her blood sang in her ears, guilt of failure pushed away by her diamond’s lingering presence, mind clear with the much-needed reprieve, and gears turning, ready to take back what they’d lost.

**Author's Note:**

> Write the diamond romances you wish to see in the world.
> 
> Comments/Concrit ALWAYS welcome! Tell me what you think <3


End file.
